language

Help Google do their job better

dankarran — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:46:59 -0500

I'm in my last week here in Germany, and very much looking forward to moving back to London to live and work, but unfortunately there are all sorts of things that need to be arranged before I move. That includes things like working out what I need to do with my bank account, pension, insurance, and other such things, all of which are really stretching my (much improved, though still very limited) knowledge of the German language.

So that means that every now and then I need to resort to dictionaries (dict.leo.org is a great community-built one) or machine translation software such as that used by Google Translate to give me a better idea of the information that I'm trying to read.

Trying Translate today on the Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Insurance) website, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before. It may just be that I don't often translate whole web pages, but when trying that today I noticed that on each phrase you hover your mouse over, you get a little popup and the option to 'suggest a better translation', thereby giving a feedback loop to continuously improve the machine-translated text.

There goes Google again, using individuals in the huge crowd that is their user base to actively improve their information services for all, and for free. They also announced this week that they will be allowing people to tweak address locations, improving their geocoding capabilities. It's not quite at the level of their efforts in India to let people generate map data for them, but it's starting to look like that's the direction it's moving in... and it's all with the aim of improving information availability around the world, so I'm all for it.

Update: It looks like Google switched to their own in-house machine translation system last month, but has been letting people suggest new translations for some languages since earlier in the year.

Reintroduction of a language

dankarran — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:55:00 -0400

Whilst home in the Isle of Man at the end of August I visited my great uncle. He's approaching 100 and is one of the few local people still left in the village of Cregneash, much of which is now operating as a living museum. He's also a bit of a film star, having had a few small roles in locally produced movies - Waking Ned perhaps being the most famous. Being so well known he gets a lot of visitors, and this time was no exception. When I popped by, he had a student visiting asking questions about Cregneash for a university project, and also a teacher from the only Manx language primary school on the Island.

The school, Bunscoill Gaelgagh in St John's, uses the medium of Manx for teaching primary school children. The majority of classes are tought in Manx, with only about 10% being taught in English. They also get to learn French as a third language.

Having learnt a little Manx when I was younger, and being keen to refresh my memory of it when starting university back in 2000, I wanted to find out how the first generation of native Manx speakers in a long time are getting to grips with the language. (I still haven't gone back and refreshed my knowledge of it, though I'd still love to, if I can find a good Manx distance learning course to take).

I had my doubts about how successful the Manx-medium school would be when I first heard about it. It turns out, however, that the children are doing very well, being fluent Manx speakers, fluent English speakers and are picking up French very easily as well.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in years to come, how many people will be speaking Manx again, how often it will be used, and what it will be used for. As you can imagine, re-introducing a language almost from scratch will be a difficult, and probably quite long process. Being a descendant of one of the last native Manx speakers, I look forward to the day when I will hear people speaking Manx to one another in everyday life. Hopefully by then I will have actually learnt some, and will be able to join in.

Introducing umlauts

dankarran — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 23:26:36 -0500

When reading an article about Google Earth in Technology Review last month, I came across a new word: co-ordinates.

Obviously being a geographer, that word is not actually a new one to me, but rather a presentation of it that I don't recall ever seeing before. The word is often written as co-ordinates or coordinates, but this time it was written with an umlaut (if that's the English word for two dots hovering over a letter): coördinates. Umlauts are something I see regularly with living in Germany, but not something I would expect to see decorating English words on which I've not previously seen an umlaut sitting.

At the time of reading the article, it puzzled me for a little while, but a transatlantic plane ride quickly helped the puzzling disappear from my mind. On my way back from CeBIT this evening, a friend passed me The New Yorker to help keep me entertained on the journey. To my surprise, once again, I came across this apparent trend in a short column about drinking Tab cola. This time it was with re-engineering (or reengineering), becoming reëngineering.

Has the adding of umlauts to English words been introduced as the new American English way to emphasise the pronunciation of words in which two letters sit together but don't work in the standard way? Is it becoming the replacement for the hyphen in British English, which in the past seems to have largely been omitted from words used commonly in the American lexicon?

Mein erster Deutsch Abendkurs

dankarran — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 20:58:55 -0500

Tonight I took my first German evening course, though I have a feeling that I may have picked a level that's slightly higher than I'm comfortable with. That could be a good thing, in that it'll push me further - afterall, sometimes it's better to jump in at the deep end - but I think I'll sit in on the next level down and see how much more comfortable I feel with that one before I make the final choice of which to pursue.

I've not learnt any German since I was in high school, except picking up odd little bits here and there, whilst travelling or trying to understand information on the internet. The past few months have helped as well, but I haven't really spoken properly to enough German speaking people yet to have learned very many new words and phrases. Moving closer into the centre of town will help with that, as hopefully I'll have a better chance of going out and meeting more people.